Here's How The New Wave Of Messaging Has Transformed Customer Service

If your customers won’t even call Mom on the phone anymore (they’re texting her instead), why are you forcing them to call your business on the phone any time they need customer service or support?

In their personal lives, your customers spend five times longer messaging (texting) every day than they do on voice calls, and this is true across all demographics: Millennials exchange an average of 67 text messages each day with friends and family, and the use of texting by older customers follows close behind. Considering this strong consumer preference for text, it’s time to look into augmenting your voice-based customer support with an option that allows customers to interact with your company via text as well.

Several companies are now offering to help you move your company to messaging-based support. One is Conversocial, whose solutions allow companies to respond to and resolve issues using the messaging functionality that is already built in to Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. [Full disclosure: I have done professional work for Conversocial.] Another is GoMoment, whose Ivy product uses the Watson artificial intelligence (AI) engine to provide messaging-based customer support to hotel guests in thousands of guest rooms at hotels across the U.S.

LivePerson, as well, is offering a framework for messaging-based customer support. LivePerson’s messaging product, LiveEngage, allows companies to offer message-based support within that company's own branded mobile app, while LiveEngage provides the behind-the-button support [Full disclosure: I have done professional work for LivePerson.]

Phone support, of course, remains a powerful way to provide customer support. Much of my own work has been as a customer service and customer support consultant for call centers, and in that capacity it’s become clear to me that telephone support, when done right, has a lot going for it. Positive aspects include the audible cues that telephone professionals rely on to help them engage customers and, when necessary, to defuse tense situations–with a methodology developed and fine-tuned over decades. Voice also has the advantage of being undeniably real time: no asynchronous back and forth (as with email) to delay accomplishing the results the customer is looking for.

But voice support has downsides as well. First off, “real time” means that the conversation likely starts with the customer getting put on hold in real time. Then, once you’re actually speaking, perhaps after a long and inconvenient hold time, both customer and the agent are forced to interact right now, whether it’s actually the best time for either of you to have a continuous engagement. In other words, as a customer, you've finally made it through the cue to talk to an agent, and although they're all yours, it's only for a set period of time; hang up, and you go back in the cue, probably unable to ever talk with that agent again to complete the conversation, perhaps about the one question you forgot to ask, the detail you forgot to have clarified for you while the clock was ticking.

The improvement here that messaging offers is a chance for the engagement to be just as real-time as a voice call but with a lot more fluidity in how that time is allocated, integrating itself into a customer's life in a way that feels organic for 21st century customers.

Interestingly, data so far doesn’t suggest that messaging leads to shorter engagements, but longer—not in terms of actual time commitment from the agent or customer, but in the span from first message to last. An average voice support call might be six to eight minutes, while preliminary figures from LivePerson's messaging rollout for T-Mobile show that the average messaging session, from first message to final message, is 86 minutes.

Keep in mind: No customer service agents were harmed [or made to go without a bathroom break] for 86 minutes straight; this isn't one of those famous/infamous Zappos 10-hour voice call marathons that you may be picturing. Instead, the first message could happen Thursday afternoon when the customer first discovers a problem with the bill, but then had to rush to pick up kids at school and couldn’t stay with the agent long enough to get things resolved. The second message might then happen late Thursday evening or Friday morning, after the agent was able to research the account history in detail. And so forth. No rush, and no need to proceed without complete information or considered responses on either side of the interaction. On the customer side, you're able to proceed entirely on your own timetable, and on the customer service agent side, a messaging-based agent now has time to research items for customers asynchronously without the time pressures of a voice-based call.

Startups and smaller enterprises, of course, don’t necessarily need to formally engage one of these companies to get started with messaging as a customer support tool. You can easily dip your feet into the water by loosening up your strictures on how your employees engage with customers, to see if messaging is a winner in your own company context. Just do your best to keep track of what’s going on through this informal and “always on” medium of text, which can quickly get overwhelming without an infrastructure in place to back it up. See how it goes, and I’m always curious to hear where your results lead you.

Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, keynote speaker, call center and customer support consultant and bestselling author. Click for two free chapters from Micah's latest book, The Heart of Hospitality, click here to email him directly for an immediate response, or give him a call at (484)343-5881.